


Change

by books_and_starss



Category: Fablehaven Series - Brandon Mull
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-10
Updated: 2020-04-10
Packaged: 2021-03-01 18:40:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,721
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23581738
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/books_and_starss/pseuds/books_and_starss
Summary: After the caretakers left, Eve wondered if there was anything she could do.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 8





	1. Chapter 1

Eve stared out the window. She was thinking about the group that had visited her father recently- the caretakers and their friends. They had left the day before. She wondered what they were doing now.  
Had they gotten to see any more dragons yet? She wished she had been allowed to go with them. She thought about what she had requested of Seth before he left.   
She wanted to go with them. She had offered to get a horse and meet them outside of the city. Seth had told her not to, and he had some convincing reasons. She wondered what would’ve happened if she had gone. Would they have allowed her to come?   
Of course, she couldn’t do anything about it now. She had made her choice, and it was the right one. Not necessarily the easiest or most fun choice, but the right one.  
Eve sighed, and wondered for the thousandth time where Seth was. She had been doing a lot of that lately. Wondering.  
She wondered where they were, what they were doing, what cool things they had gotten to see in the day that they had been gone that she would probably never see in her entire life.  
She wondered if anything would ever change. Eve thought the neutrality was stupid- obviously, because it was- and wondered why no one spoke up. Lomo had, and he had been locked up for it. Eve wondered for the first time if there was something she could do about it.  
She was only twelve years old. Could she really make a difference in the thousands-of-years-old tradition of neutrality that her people held? Surely one kid couldn’t make such a change.  
But what if she could? A change could be as easy as speaking up. Lomo had done it. And maybe, just maybe, since her father was the emperor, people would listen to her.  
Yes, Eve thought, standing up won’t be hard. The worst punishment she would get was the dungeon. That was Lomo’s only punishment, and really, the dungeon wasn’t much of a punishment. She could do it. It wasn’t that hard.


	2. Chapter 2

Garreth was starting to worry about Eve.  
His little sister had been acting weird lately. She talked less, ate less, and stared out windows more. He wasn’t sure what was wrong, but he wanted to help her.  
There was another thing in particular that he was worried about, too. A few nights ago, Eve had come to talk to him.   
He’d been in his room, about to get ready to go to bed, when Eve had opened the door and asked to talk to him.  
He’d been worried then, because she had looked almost like a child who has just woken up from a nightmare. He remembered when she was young enough to come visit his room after waking up from nightmares, but that was long ago, and besides, it wasn’t even late enough for her to have had a nightmare.  
“Hey,” he’d said. “Is something wrong?”  
Eve looked like she almost hadn’t realized that she had just walked into his room. “What? No, of course not,” she’d answered, quite unconvincingly, in his opinion.  
“Okay,” he’d said. There was definitely something wrong, but he didn’t want to scare her off. “What’s up?”  
Eve had seemed to relax. “Um, I just wanted to talk to you. I was thinking…” she trailed off. She looked undecisive, like she wanted to say something, but wasn’t sure how.   
Garreth had waited for her to decide what she wanted to say. Sometimes, thoughts can’t be rushed.  
Suddenly, though, Eve seemed to change her mind. “Never mind,” she said. “It’s not important. I’ll just go to bed now.” She had then left the room quickly.  
Since then, he had been making it a point to watch her more closely. He tried to figure out what was bothering her so much.  
Despite all of his efforts, he still hadn’t figured it out.

Eve was frustrated.  
She didn’t know what to do. Now that she had gotten it into her mind, she couldn’t get it out. She wanted to do something.  
She wanted to leave Terrabelle and have an adventure. She wanted to meet dragons and nipsies and whatever other creatures were out there that she still hadn’t met.  
But even more than that, she wanted to change something.  
When first the caretakers visited, Eve had been jealous. She had wanted to go with Seth and his sister, see the dragons. Now, it was different.  
Yeah, she still wanted to go see dragons. Now, though, she also wanted to change something. Eve wanted to make a difference.  
She had had the idea, and it had stuck. She wasn’t sure what to do with it, though. It wasn’t like she could just run off and become an outlaw like Lomo, even if she wanted to. She was a kid.  
This had been bothering her a lot recently. She was going to ask her big brother, Garreth, about it, but then she had changed her mind, because what if he told their father? She didn’t imagine that ending well.  
She was twelve years old. She still wasn’t sure what she wanted to make of her life. What she did know was that she wanted to make a change in the world. She wanted to have an impact.  
What a twelve-year-old could do to make an impact, Eve didn’t know yet, but she planned on figuring it out.


	3. Chapter 3

Eve had made up her mind. Well, she had already made up her mind, but she was doing it again. Making up her mind multiple times. Great.  
What she was deciding on was that she was going to do something to make a change. She felt like she’d been making up her mind to make a change for the past few days, but that was okay with her. It only made her more determined.  
Today, though, today was different. She wasn’t just making up her mind. Today, she was going to actually do something about the decision she had made. She was going to make a difference today.  
She knew that it wouldn’t be big- no way. She had only just entered the practice of difference-making, and she was going to start small.  
She planned to start by making small changes- maybe talking to her parents, her brother, and her friends. Eventually, by starting small, she’d work her way up to making big changes.   
A slightly devious thought entered Eve’s mind. When she started talking to her friends, maybe she could get them to rethink the policy, too. Maybe they would start to question tradition, and maybe they could help her make a difference.  
At the moment, Eve was sitting on her favorite bench at the park that was just down the street from her house. It wasn’t early, but it was before her lunch time. She still had plenty of time left in the day to do something different.  
She tilted her head back and stared at the clouds as she mused over her position. What could she do today to make a change?  
Being twelve years old, she had already crossed off the idea of running around being a vigilante and joining battles like Lomo did. Her father’s people would catch her before she got anywhere with that.  
She did, however, plan to go visit Lomo. He was just in the dungeon, and there were no rules against visitors down there. Eve thought it would be a good idea to ask Lomo about where he got the courage to do what he did, and how he got the means.  
Although, she supposed, it probably wasn’t that hard for him. Technically, nothing was preventing any of the Fair Folk from leaving Terrabelle. The reason nobody left was because they all went along with the neutrality policy. Anyone could just walk out of the town and leave, if they wanted to.  
That wasn’t Eve’s objective, though. She didn’t need to leave Terrabelle to make a change. She could change things from her own house.  
She imagined that a cloud was a dragon, and thought back to where she was now. She knew a few steps of what she could do, but was she going to do right now?   
Well, first off- what were her objectives? Eve wanted to see dragons, but that wasn’t the point of this quest to start some sort of change in her life. Most of all, she thought, she wanted to remove the stupid neutrality policy.   
Obviously, her father wouldn’t just agree to drop a thousands-of-years-old tradition. That was a big change, one that she’d need to work her way up to.  
All of the sudden, an idea occurred to her. Maybe change wasn’t only physical. Maybe she could start off with something so small it almost seemed ridiculous at first.   
What if the first step to making a change could be something so small as being kind to others? Eve wasn’t sure if that would help her at all with the neutrality thing, but she thought it was a good idea.   
Maybe someday Seth and his sister would come back. They could bring their nipsie with them, too. They’d probably be able to help her get her father to remove the neutrality policy, because she knew they definitely didn’t like that stupid thing.  
She would have to work with the idea. She could probably soften her father to listening about that problem. That would take a while. It would be a work in progress. In the meantime, she could do small things, and being kind sounded to her like just the place to start.  
Eve looked down from the clouds, down at the few children playing on the playground. She smiled. Now, she had a rough idea of her plans.  
She would start off by making sure that she used a kind attitude toward everyone she talked to. She could smile at people who she didn’t normally pay attention to at school. She would try to slip something about her negative feelings toward the neutrality policy into conversations with her dad. She’d go talk to Lomo. Those were all things that she could start doing today.  
Eve jumped up from her bench and ran down the street back towards her house. Time to make a change.


End file.
